Are Banksters today's Untouchables?

I never missed an episode of the "Untouchables" on TV (referred to by my Daddy as "Cops and WOPs"...hey, Paisons, lighten up, I'm a WOP, too). I would curl up on my Daddy's lap on the big ottoman in the living room every week and watch Elliot Ness in black-and-white take on all those bad guys, Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Bugs Moran, Bugsy Siegal...why were they always referred to as Bugs, I wondered as a child. Was it because they were as elusive as Bugs Bunny, I thought? And why did Elliot Ness's hat never fall off in a fist fight? These were the puzzling and unanswered questions of childhood.

Well, today, I sit in front of my computer and read about the banksters and the GOP (the Grand Oil Party...or did the WOPs merely change their identity to GOP or can't spell?) and the defense contractors stealing hundreds of billions, if not trillions in total, of middle class taxpayers monies and beating the rap. Aren't gangsters fascinating, beating the system and stealing all the loot? And they are still paying off the grimey hands of politicians with millions of dollars every year, paying to play the gangster version of Monopoly.

Of course, today we have New York's Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, playing the role of Eliott Ness, since Robert Stack is no longer around. (Can one die from having too many face lifts?) And the gangsters no longer have flower shops as fronts, but better yet, banks: it's much closer to the stash...makes sense, huh? And the guidos have all been replaced by respectable front men (no more slick-haired Sicilians), with MBAs, law degrees, and CPA certificates. Today we have Bank of America, Wells Fargo (the Tales of Wells Fargo...another weekly show, but now updated for modern times), Citigroup, Ally Financial, JP Morgan Chase, and a cast of thousands rivaling a production of Spartacus. Capone, Siegal, Lansky, Moran et al pale in comparison to these big boys.

Tonight's episode is secularization: how those banksters money laundered and counterfeited all those worthless loans into marketable securities, stealing hundreds and hundreds of billions and billions of dollars from naive investors and your pension funds, and how they got away with it...until now?! Will these banksters elude Eric Schneiderman and continue to get away with the crime of the millenium? Will they just get a slap on the wrist so our government can assure the American people that truth, justice, and the American way has been preserved?

Of course!

The crooks always get away with it. They are too big to jail (a/k/a, too big to fail). As long as there is pay to play, and Congress and Presidents needing hundreds of millions every year to run for office, they always get away with it. Yes, now and then, they have to throw a sacrificial lamb under the bus to appease the anger of all of us being fleeced; but such is the cost of this never ending war between good and evil, the gullible American public and the crooked bunch of Wall Streeters. As long as the average American Joe Six Pack has his pizza and NASCAR, he is content to be fleeced and believe that all is well in Washington Land.